During the last several years, the advancements of technology have had a tremendous impact on our lives. There are various real life scenarios where use of electronics and communication devices such as personal computers, sensing networks and devices, hand-held personal organizers and computerized automotive controls have changed one's daily life. However, there are very few instances where these technological advancements are being efficiently used in parking monitoring management.
One can easily find a lot of parking facilities across the city. Most of these parking facilities have ample parking slots to accommodate vehicles. However, most of these facilities are not monitored properly, which leads to a chaotic state of affairs. The chaos leads to violating the rules of parking facility by drivers. For example, more often than not, a driver of a medium size vehicle parks his vehicle in a slot allocated for a large size vehicle which leads to a lesser number of available slots allocated for large size vehicles. In addition, even if the driver parks his car in an appropriate size slot, an improper parking of the vehicle in that slot causes an encroachment on an adjacent parking slot. This inadvertent encroachment further leads to reduced number of parking slots. Moreover, at times, the drivers are not aware that they have parked their vehicle at inappropriate slot or encroached on an adjacent parking slot or have violated the parking rules of that facility.
Most of the existing facilities deploy a person/team to visually inspect all of the parking slots periodically, regardless of whether vehicles are actually there. This type of monitoring of parking is costly and time consuming. In addition, this task becomes more difficult when the parking facilities are distributed over a large area, such as a city block or a large, multi-level parking garage.
The prior art provides some existing parking monitoring systems which utilizes technology in monitoring of the parking slots. However, most of these systems are limited to the detection of the presence or absence of a vehicle in a particular parking slot. Such systems are employed, for example, in garages to provide occupancy statistics, and to direct vehicles to open spaces. These systems do not apply parking restriction rules to determine whether a particular vehicle is parked in a slot where it should not be or is parked properly in the slot.